It is easy to give wholesale reasons why nobody needs to be in such a condition as this; but it is not improbable that there are some poor souls who, from no fault of their own, drop through the great sieve of charity into utter destitution.

He was reduced, on the passage, together with the troops under his command, to the most extreme destitution and distress.

Would our Lord have put such language, into the lips of one held up by himself, as a model of gospel humility, to illustrate its lowliness, its conscious destitution of all merit, and deep sense of all ill desert?

There are, however, several hundred thousand people who would starve to death upon their present incomes if they lived in the United States or in any of the European countries, but there it costs so little to sustain life and a penny goes so far that what an American working man would call abject destitution is an abundance.

Mirabeau was overwhelmed with debt; and though his father had died in the preceding summer, he had not yet entered into his inheritance, but was in a state little short of absolute destitution.

This was during the period of the Famine, the winter of 1846-47, when the stern necessities of the time seemed to afford a chance of gaining attention for what appeared to me the only mode of combining relief to immediate destitution with permanent improvement of the social and economical condition of the Irish people.

"Much as I should glory in benefiting mankind, I could not by any effort or sacrifice ameliorate the condition of these poor people, although I would willingly do anything in my power to testify my sorrow for their wretched destitution.

It is perhaps not in the power of a man whose attention has been divided by diversity of pursuits, and who has not been accustomed to derive from others much of his happiness, to image to himself such helpless destitution, such dismal inanity.

miseria, f., poverty, penury; worthlessness, destitution.

Happily for them the ecclesiastic I have mentioned was not quite so confident as their father, of his winning back the magnificent patrimony of his ancestors; and by his advice the daughters had been secured twenty pounds a year each, under the marriage settlement of their parents, which was all that stood between this proud house and literal destitution.

Their manifest destitution, and the misery they had suffered, had touched the kindly white residents of that far off place, and a subscription was raised for them, resulting in the collection of an amount sufficient to enable them to reach Rangoon in comparative comfort.

As I looked back over my own life, and wished I could read them its lessons,and I looked back a good way; for I was very young, when the miserable destitution of a drunkard's wife, whom I assisted, showed me how comfortable a thing it was to rest at the mercy of the English common law,as I looked back over my long interest in the position of woman, I felt that my greatest drawback had been the want of such an example.

Each succeeding party actuated by like anxieties and precautions, departed with its charges, leaving pitiable destitution behind; leaving mournful conditions in camp,conditions attributable as much to the work of time and atmospheric agencies as to the deplorable expedients to which the starving were again and again reduced.

But multitudes of them were, no doubt, not only relatively but positively poorer; the destruction of the guilds of labor, the displacements in industry, had left great numbers not only of the peasantry and the artisans but also of the poorer nobles in practical destitution.

Hext lay, as he supposed, and as the doctors told him, on his death-bed, and, pondering on the probable destitution of his family, he repented his rash vow, and stated to Adelaide that he should no longer oppose her wishes.

Over a million inhabitants have sought refuge in other parts of Austria, and they are in sheer destitution.

The great man, falling into shocking destitution, broken down and conquered by adversity, returned to England in 1712 to seek aid and an asylum.

He had heard in Rome of the spiritual destitution of the Irish Catholics in Australia, and he secured the permission of his superiors to minister to the needs of his compatriots in the Antipodes.

A large proportion of the cases of temporary destitution in ordinarily self-supporting families is due to sickness.

It happened during the summer of 1723, when the poet, who was in his customary state of (theatrical) destitution, determined to replenish his shabby purse by bringing out a tragedy.

They talk of the whole cost of the war as so much destruction of capital, and maintain that by this destruction we shall be for some generations in a state of comparative destitution.

It saves them from the vagrant destitution which must largely attend immediate emancipation in localities where their numbers are very great, and it gives the inspiring assurance that their posterity shall be free forever.

Whilst marching towards the place they saw coming to meet then, with every appearance of the most woful destitution, Peter the Hermit, followed by a small band of pilgrims escaped from the disasters of their expedition, who had passed the winter, as he had, in Bithynia, waiting for more fortunate crusaders.

In admiring the greatness and glory of the city, therefore, we must remember that there was a gloomy counterpart to its splendor in the very extended destitution and poverty to which the mass of the people were everywhere doomed.

I tried vainly in Cairo and Alexandria to find a missionary who would supply my heathenish destitution of the Sacred Writings; for I had reached the East through Austria, where they are prohibited, and to travel through Palestine without them, would be like sailing without pilot or compass.